Instant Messenger (IM) tools are used widely inside and outside corporations for communication, however, a corporation usually does not want to invest in a server of self, but wish to use free-of-charge IM tools in public networks which provide more practical and convenient communication for small or middle-sized corporations, so as to provide the intercommunion across different departments of the corporation, within a corporation department and between the corporation and external contacts.
A user may establish a group with an IM tool for more convenient and effective communication among multiple members. In a group communication system of the prior art, a user may establish a discussion group for communication among multiple members. However, the communication is limited to plain text-based communication, in another word, only text-based communication of a multi-user discussion or a whole group is supported by the group communication system of the prior art.
FIG. 1 shows a method in the prior art. In this figure, a certain member 700 initiates a session request, packs a corresponding recipient member list and text information, and sends the packed text information and recipient member list to a backstage server 800, the backstage server 800 sends the text information to a recipient member 900 according to the recipient member list from the member 700 and finishes the session. It can be seen that in the group communication system of the prior art, the discussion group or group performs plain text-based communication and the group members also perform plain text-based communication.
The disadvantage of the prior art is that the communication between discussion groups, groups and members, which is based on text information transmission performed by the backstage server based on the recipient identifiers, cannot effectively support file transmission, multimedia audio and video interaction, because the backstage server cannot support to transmit huge data in file and multimedia audio and video, but only the small data in text information, in another word, the prior art cannot satisfy the needs of file transmission, multimedia audio and video interaction.
The prior art cannot provide sufficient support for communication among group members, yet the application scope of group communication are growing further to corporation groups along with the development of group services, which raises new requirements to the group communication system, in another word, members or colleagues need an advanced communication method, e.g., for file transmission or multimedia audio and video interaction. That means that the group members need not only plain text-based communication, but also advanced communication including file transmission, multimedia audio and video interaction.